After the murder of George Floyd, federal law enforcement agencies banned the use of chokeholds during arrests. But new reporting from ProPublica found more than 40 cases where immigration agents used these banned practices, including in Portland. Nicole Foy reported on this story and joins us to share more.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. After George Floyd’s murder, many states and law enforcement agencies across the country banned the use of chokeholds except under specific circumstances. That includes Oregon, which in 2020 passed a law aimed at reducing the use of these holds, and the list includes the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which prohibits these holds by its agents unless there is an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury. But ProPublica has found that federal immigration agents used these practices more than 40 times in the last year, including in Portland, often in cases where experts say they did not see an imminent threat. Nicole Foy reported this story for ProPublica. She joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Nicole Foy: Thank you for having me.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the range of incidents that you cataloged?
Foy: My coworker on this, a co-writer on this story, McKenzie Funk, and I found that over the past year immigration agents from a variety of federal agencies have been using really dangerous – and banned in some cases – chokeholds and other restraints that have been highly discouraged by their own training and certainly discouraged or banned by many police departments around the country.
The banned chokeholds include things like carotid restraints and then the things that, really, there was a sea change after the murder of George Floyd, where so many agencies, including DHS, also banned or discouraged the use of kneeling on people’s necks, kneeling on their backs. All of these moves that can be dangerous because they may restrict breathing or cause other really serious injuries, and we found more than 40 instances, many of those recorded on video, of immigration agents using this during arrests around the country.
Miller: I mentioned that one of the incidents you reviewed happened in Portland. Can you tell us that story?
Foy: This is a video and a story that was reported, I think, in The Oregonian in particular, where there’s agents trying to arrest a DoorDash driver and you can hear him in the video, screaming for air and telling officers in Spanish, “Air, air, air, I need air. I can’t breathe. I’m dying.” It’s unclear if any of the officers on scene spoke Spanish because they’re speaking to him in English the entire time and telling him things like stop resisting.
It’s really indicative of one of the reasons why we thought it was important to highlight this story, and what many of the experts that we asked to review this video and others pointed out as one of the reasons why these techniques of kneeling on people’s necks and backs are, even if they’re not explicitly banned in DHS policy in particular, they are highly discouraged in their training because of the way it can make it really difficult for people, as this man says, to breathe. It can really endanger peoples’ lives and is one of those reasons why it’s really the only type of thing that is supposed to be used if officers feel like they need to use deadly force.
Miller: So as you said, after the murder of George Floyd, these local or state-level prohibitions on these chokeholds took hold, but just to be clear, that doesn’t impact federal law enforcement practices, right?
Foy: It doesn’t, but DHS and the Department of Justice, in 2023, for DHS in particular, also changed their policies. Chokeholds and carotid restraints, for DHS, were explicitly banned unless there’s a call for deadly force. And we talked with one of the trainers who trains ICE officers, and people from a variety of police departments and federal agencies, at FLETC, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, who said that after George Floyd’s murder that DHS said we do not want our officers doing anything with kneeling on necks, kneeling on backs, do not teach them this. This is not what we want to use.
When we spoke with experts who had also worked in DHS, whether in Border Patrol or ICE, for decades, they said that there wasn’t really a lot of pushback against this because it was generally understood that you weren’t supposed to be using these tactics anyway. I think one former DHS official who just retired in 2024 said – I’m paraphrasing, but to the extent of, you know, I arrested drug traffickers and human traffickers and really dangerous people, and I can’t think of using a chokehold once.
And when he reviewed a number of the videos on our list, including the one of this DoorDash driver in Portland, he said that it wasn’t clear to him or to many of the experts why officers felt like they needed to use this dangerous, often deadly use of force to arrest people who sometimes didn’t have a criminal record and really didn’t appear to be doing anything beyond resisting or trying to get out of the arrest – which is not one of the criteria for when you can use deadly force.
Miller: As you noted, three years ago the Department of Homeland Security said, “Agents, you cannot use these potentially deadly holds unless there is a call for deadly force.” Was that policy officially rescinded?
Foy: You know, that’s something that we can’t totally get a clear answer from DHS on. They told us earlier, I want to say earlier this year, I mean in 2025, that yeah, that policy is still in place where we don’t have a new use of force policy, but as we can see playing out around the country, it’s not entirely clear and they haven’t been entirely clear about if they are following new guidelines.
Miller: If you’re just tuning in, I’m talking right now with ProPublica reporter Nicole Foy. She and a reporting teammate recently cataloged more than 40 uses of chokeholds by federal immigration agents over just the last year. Could you tell us about another incident that you reviewed? This involves a 10th grader named Arnoldo Bazan.
Foy: Yeah, I think this case particularly stands out because, as you said, this involves a 10th grader, a 16-year-old. He and his father were driving and getting some food before school when masked immigration officers pulled them over. They tried to drive away. Eventually, his father got out of the car and ran into a nearby store, and his 16-year-old son, who is a U.S. citizen, followed him in when he says he saw the officers really treating his father pretty roughly.
From their bystander video that we pulled and that we watched, that Arnoldo recorded himself, shows immigration agents really violently take down both him and his father, and particularly, they put the 16-year-old in a chokehold. You can see in the video he’s on the ground and has an arm around his neck, as he’s screaming at various points during this arrest that he’s a minor, he’s a U.S. citizen, that he wasn’t doing anything. He’s trying to tell officers what had happened before in the chase in which – we reviewed video that confirmed this – immigration agents had slammed into their car several times, and it’s a really violent arrest.
When I talked with his family and with Arnoldo afterwards, it was a pretty traumatizing event and really one of those reasons, it makes it very clear why this type of restraint is banned; because the 16-year-old, when he was dropped off at his house afterwards by officers, his sisters had to rush him to the hospital because he could barely speak. His lips were like, in a video you watched, they were blue. They took him to the hospital and the staff there, his sister tells me, immediately asked him if he’d been in a chokehold. That’s a really traumatic thing for a 16-year-old to go through, who on top of that also lost his father that day, because his father was detained and deported within days.
Miller: What did you hear from the Department of Homeland Security when you brought this and other incidents to their attention?
Foy: They defended their officers in every single incident that we shared with them. We sent them every video that we used in our story, including many more that we ended up not including for one reason or the other. We asked them in many of these cases, especially the ones where there was the use of the things that are particularly banned and not just discouraged – the chokehold or the carotid restraint – we asked them, this is something that your officers are only allowed to do if there is a need for deadly force. Can you explain why it was necessary to use deadly force on a 16-year-old U.S. citizen? Can you explain why it was necessary to use deadly force on this protester who it doesn’t appear made any move towards a weapon or is any threat in any way? And in every instance they defended their officers and said that they were following the rules. We did ask them if any of their officers had been disciplined for, again, acting outside policy, and they didn’t answer us.
Miller: I’m curious what it took for you to report this story. I mean, how did you go about making this list?
Foy: This is something that came up because I’ve been tracking different types of immigration arrests since the beginning of 2025. They were just something that we were tracking as we reported on things like immigration officials breaking car windows to arrest people and then sometimes really violently dragging them out of the car, the numerous arrests of U.S. citizens around the country. So many of these people who were arrested and using these chokeholds were U.S. citizens. And so just trying to track where this happens.
But we also felt it was really important for this story to go back to experts and to ask a group of not just DHS officials with long experiences in border patrol or ICE, but also to ask former police officers and trainers of police officers and ICE agents and ask them, is this something that officers in your department would be allowed to do, or would they, at the very least, be investigated?
And from this group of experts, they were genuinely pretty appalled by what they saw. They described what they saw as bad policing and incredibly dangerous and really inexplicable for why so many of these tactics were used against people who, to the best of our knowledge and the best of what videos and additional reporting could show, didn’t appear to be exhibiting the type of threat that would require the use of deadly force.
Miller: In the two infamously public cases in Minneapolis in the last month or so – the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti – federal authorities grossly misrepresented what happened, even though there was tons of bystander cell phone footage that the entire world could see. What does that mean for the cases in which we can’t see what happened?
Foy: I think it raises a lot of questions. Again, I’ve been reporting, using videos recorded by the people being arrested themselves or bystanders to the arrest. I’ve been using videos in my reporting all year. And over and over again, it has become incredibly common for DHS, when asked about this, to describe something that absolutely does not match a video.
This did not start with the shootings in Minneapolis. It is a very clear pattern now, where, with or without video evidence, the narrative that DHS describes about many of these arrests does not match either the reality that was recorded in the video or what other witnesses say.
So I think it makes it very hard to know if what the government is saying is true about these arrests. I know that, for our part, we fact-check DHS just like every other source, but it has now become honestly incredibly important to get secondary reports about the situation because in so many of these cases the government’s account just does not match the reality that everybody else at the scene witnessed.
Miller: I’m curious, what did you hear from current and former law enforcement officials about why we’re seeing so many chokeholds by federal agents right now?
Foy: Some of the things that they pointed to are the things that we know have been a factor in much of this increased immigration enforcement. You know, there are quotas, there are expanded rules for who can be arrested. There’s been a lift on the ban of collateral arrests, which means that if you pull over a car looking for someone specific and you find two other people you weren’t looking for, you are encouraged to arrest them as well.
That certainly plays into this, but one of the things that our experts pointed out, is that this is coming, again, from these types of enforcement actions that are not targeted, but in fact are kind of those roving patrols, where immigration agents appear to be going through communities where they may be following up on a report of one of the people on their list was in this area. Or they’re going to a Home Depot parking lot because they check the plates of one person they’re looking for. But then everyone in that area is suddenly under this scrutiny, and it’s leading to a number of unplanned and really chaotic arrests.
That’s one of the things that so many of these former DHS officials or former police officers pointed out is that, when you do arrest in this way and it’s not targeted, you have no idea what this person’s going to do, how they’re going to react. Are there children nearby? Are there families nearby? Are they going to run? And it makes it really difficult for these officers to plan, which these experts believe is a big part of why we’re seeing this kind of really chaotic and often very violent arrests play out in box office stores and restaurants under construction in the middle of neighborhoods. It’s not planned operations, even though DHS will repeatedly say that every one of these arrests was a targeted arrest.
Miller: The article that folks can read in ProPublica, it’s full of some frame-by-frame photo montages of some of the bystander footage. I’m curious what it was like for you, personally, to review frame after frame of people being choked?
Foy: You know, it’s not a pleasant job. It is certainly difficult, but I think it’s important to do these types of stories and review this type of footage, because this is happening all over the country, and as you pointed out earlier, not everything is filmed. Much of it is filmed now. We’re seeing this huge effort across the country that, honestly, as a journalist who relies on these videos to do my job, often is frankly, pretty inspiring.
You know, this is what people are watching happening to their loved ones, to their father, to their son, to their mother. People are experiencing this in real life, and often what follows is just as difficult. They may be separated from a family member for a period of time, and so I think it’s really important to document these things. It is difficult, but it’s happening. It’s the truth. We can’t look away.
Miller: Nicole, thanks very much.
Foy: Thank you.
Miller: Nicole Foy is a reporter for ProPublica.
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